On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 03:52:32PM -0600, Calum Mackay wrote: > Ben Rockwood wrote: > > To be clear, its not cleaning up the files that concerns me, but > > creating them at all. > > The files need to be created, in order to emulate the expected behaviour > where open files remain accessible after unlinking, with the file being > removed only on "last close". An NFSv3 server cannot support this, since > there is no open/close in v3, and it's hard in v4, so we handle this on > the client with the .nfsXXXX rename mechanism.
NFSv4 ought to be able to do avoid this, except that though v4 is stateful, this statefulness is optional. > The root cause of these files left lying around might be that something > deleted the file whilst it was open, but the app that had it open > crashed before it could close it (or the client crashed). I wouldn't say that opening a file and unlink()ing it while holding it open is bad behavior. Unix has supported that forever, and it's probably common behavior for temporary files (but then, those end up in /tmp). But for this particular reason it should be avoided. What might help here is to create the .nfs files at the root of the filesystem -- then there'd be no need to find(1) and unlink them periodically. Nico --
